Rubik making sales, but not yet profits

Rubik Financial may have published financial statements on the last possible day of profit reporting, but it also produced one of the more interesting, simply by taking the trouble to try to explain the business, priorities, sales and budgets in an accessible way.

One motive for the relative openness must be to generate some investor interest in small cap stock reporting large headline losses (and a smaller, "normalised" loss).

Rubik creates and adapts information technology platforms that assist banks and others to manage discrete business lines such as collections, cards and payments. For very small deposit taking institutions Rubik markets a core banking system, a local adaptation of the Temenos system.

New customers listed by Rubik in a commentary include GE Money, ING, Maleny Credit Union and Tabcorp.

These, and the implementations from past sales, are driving top line growth, with revenue up from a bit more than $2 million to a bit less than $9 million in the year to June 2009, with most of that reported in the second half.

The headline loss of $4 million reflected the write-off of a $1.6 million investment in a firm that registered shelf companies as well as expensing share-based payments to executives. The normalised loss for the full year was $570,000.

Rubik is run by Craig Coleman, the executive chair (formerly of ANZ and Home Building Society) and Brent Jackson (formerly an executive with ME Bank).